November 22, 2011

Idiorhythmic IPC Inconcinnity

1 hour 4 minutes

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Chris explains what he thinks Thanksgiving was about (or what he thought it was about, he's no historian).

The Daily Show had a segment about "Evacuation Day" and the history behind it.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

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Happy Evacuation Day

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Ask our listeners: How many hours do you work in a work week? How much is the norm in your country of origin?

Chris's friend Dave wrote about the surprises of going full time as a consultant.

Dave mentions that on the software side, jobs on sites like Elance are underbid by overseas contractors.

Chris loves an article from an IT consultant with some tips on how to be a good consultant to hire.

Though Dave did not show much interest in ham radio in general, he did decide to go hang out with them!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysv4SNLwM20

Chris is still looking for more people to join him in getting a license by the end of the year!

If you want to study, there are study sites and practice exams out there.

Chris has been looking at buying a snowblower and has looked at making it autonomous. There is even an autonomous snowplow competition!

Perhaps this is a future venture for iRobot and their Roomba platform?

Dave's office is ready for some wall hangings (post-approval from the wife, of course). He should hang up the Widlar poster!

The_Axis wrote in about their reuse of PCBs as tail stabilizers for a homemade rocket!

Eric the Embedded HW Guy wrote a post on EEweb about a homebrew solder smoke fume extractor.

Our occasional co-host Jeff Keyzer (@mightyohm) set up a Flickr photo pool with pictures of electronics benches. Add yours today!

Chip of the Week:

Gleaned from the /r/nicechips subreddit, the ATtiny10 is a (tiny!) SOT23-6, 8-bit microcontroller with integrated flash (1K), SRAM (32B), ADC (4 channels/8 bit) and a lot more. Crazy!

Is there a standard footprint repository where someone can find IPC standard footprints (and maybe some of the odd ones too)?

On Ask An Engineer this week, Chris wrote in with a question about KiCAD and Limor and Phil were hopeful about the emerging XML standard from EAGLE, that it would open up the ecosystem.

Bunnie Huang of Chumby writes about buying an iPhone schematic on the street in Shenzhen and using it to source cheap parts. Chris calls this Coattailing.

Apparently phone makers need to recoup costs in the first few months of sales of their product because they are so quickly overtaken by the newest phones.

Next week, we will have John Edmond, the CTO of Cree, on the show! Wow!

If you have a question for him or would like to suggest something for the show, either leave a comment on this page, the suggestion page, email us, send Chris or Dave a tweet or leave a comment on our brand new Google+ page for The Amp Hour.

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By The Amp Hour (Chris Gammell and David L Jones)

4.9

226226 ratings